I am certain the children will tire of hearing this one day: "People who complain without offering solutions are just making noise."
Month: April 2006
Miracle Animals
US to nuke Iran
So, did anyone not see this one coming?
US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The administration of
President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against
Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,”
the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz
“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.
“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,”
[Source]
Which of course is one reason we are in Iraq. (in my opinion)
Climbing
Sarah, the deprived, is off to go rock climbing today with her church group. I found out as I dropped her off that I could have gone along and participated. That would have been a pleasure but might have put a damper on Sarah’s never ending search for independence. If it is too rainy, they will switch to hiking. I am happy to see her participating in such great outdoor activities!
Storms brewing
Storms are brewing both physically and euphemistically. Expect us to be without power in a few hours. The storms last weekend set a tree leaning precariously over the powerlines at the end of the street and the power company refused to do anything about it.
Bush Gets Scolded
A member of GW’s audience in NC gave him his mind.
“While I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water,” real estate broker Harry Taylor told Bush at a town hall meeting. “I have never felt more ashamed of nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington.”
My Life…
…is often like the beginning part of a Calgon commercial.
My Son Quit Eating
Years ago my cooking skills were improving. I was toying with more gourmet type means and decorating my plates with garnishes to coordinate with the table center piece. Enter the children. I’m reduced to mac n cheese, chicken nuggets, peanut butter and jelly, and hamburgers. Ketchup goes on everything.
We further complicate things with the children’s eating habits. Tommy is a 15 year old garbage disposal that doesn’t eat spinnach. Sarah is a 12 year old wannabe vegetarian. Noah is a 9 year old carnivore. Amy is a 3 year old wannabe Sarah (that is, she would eat anything and still tries but adores her siste so much that she copies Sarah). Evan is a 10 month old breastfeeder that so far eats almost anything places in his mouth (including all the things Amy has fed him: Cheatoes, peanut butter, jelly, poptarts, yogurt, chocolate, etc.), except when he’s sick.
I thought eating habits were improving. For awhile he was trying new things. In the past he would make this huge production about gagging and having to chase down the miscule sampling that we would let him get away with trying. For instance, we allowed him a single grain of rice and he spent nearly a minute acting like he was going to throw up. One day his progress suddenly reversed. Instead of trying new things, foods to which he had grown accustomed suddenly started dropping off the menu. Jelly became evil so PBJs became just peanut butter sandwiches. The staple green bean, the one vegetable I could get everyone to eat, became a gagging fight to get down; now he gets a single green bean on every plate and won’t touch it. Noah eats no, zero, zilch vegetables.
This week breakfast changed. Noah has reduced his breakfast to a single slice of toast with cinnamon sugar on it. I have no words. I hope he grows out of this.
Lost Numbers
Until I can get caught on my work and do a decent Lost review, I’m summize with: The food has been bugging me since Desmond’s introduction. The day he cracked a fresh egg into a glass I thought "they are getting supplies somehow." When Henry asked, "how old is that cereal?" my thoughts that they were getting resupplied were solidified. Seeing the parachute drop was awesome! Now, who thinks these guys are on an elaborate set like the Truman Show? Do the blast doors come down in the hatch so that the occupants don’t see that the food supplies are delivered by truck from a secret tunnel and not actually air dropped? If that’s so, why does the staff resupply and risk getting caught when they know that people are outside of the bunker? I must stop for now.
Numbers note from Hurley’s April 5 show: There were 23 people on the deck when it collapsed. The deck was designed to hold 8.
Names on my brain
Larry and Carla Hood
WindowsXP on a Mac?
There was a contest for something like $10,000 to see who could be first to successfully install WindowsXP on the Intel based Macs. Looks like Apple won.
Spammers be gone!
I’ve done away with the Did You Pass Math plugin (at least temporarily) so that people can comment without having to compute. Instead, I’m trying on Spam Karma 2. My worry is that Spam Karma will produce too many false positives; that is, labeling legitimate comments as spam. I did not have the worry of false positives with Did You Pass Math but I fear that false negatives were too frustrating to readers. I just wish Spammers would go away.
Cool dates and times
Last night I was up but only semi-conscious and in no way eager to get out of bed to make the appropriate post at the time. Cathy had pointed out to me that we had an outstanding time last night. At 1:23am we had 1:23 4/5/6! Won’t happen again for 100 years.
Self-replicating robots
I love robots. Always have. These are strange. I can’t take my eyes off them!
More info on the self-repairing machines. This is a project of Cornell University in the proof of concept stage.
Virus Writers Are Criminal
The dollar value I can assess to lost productivity to myself and my client because of the CWS CoolWebSearch (Inet20001) malware and viruses is ridiculous. Virus Writers and malware writers be damned! The stress of trying to remove this mess has taken time off the end of my life I’m sure. So not only are they stealing my money, they are killing me!
That said, today’s challenge. Take a windows 2000 workstation that would boot to the windows login screen then restart after reporting "svchost.exe The application failed to initialize properly. 0xc0000142" Booting to safe mode produced the same error (turns out this is from a copy in c:\temp\svchost.exe). Long and short. The machine did not have enough memory to run the Windows Ultimate Boot CD but did run the Linux Ultimate Boot CD and a virus scan showed some potentials. Notes taken. Damn Small Linux refuses to delete files from the hard drive. Go to the magic toolbox and pull out 6 floppies that are a modified set of Windows XP boot floppies with a Windows 2000 registry repair option (search MS.com) Registry repaired and files deleted from within DOS. Reboot reveals I missed much. Persistence prevails. (I’d go more detailed but I was cruising on a web application this morning and didn’t intend to have a 12 hour speed bump).
